“Serving up to 32 cars at a time, the fifth annual Bucks County pandemic flu drive in the Sesame Place parking lot was the largest yet.

The county set up eight tents, each at least double the size of a two-car garage and able to serve four cars at a time. Two lanes led up to the drive-through vaccination pods. The setup allowed health workers to accommodate 10,000 people easily over the course of the 6-hour drill.”

Read more of the article from the Bucks County Courier Times.

It has long been one of the most vexing causes of America’s skyrocketing health costs: people not taking their medicine.

Sellers of ginseng, echinacea and other herbal and dietary supplements often cross the line in marketing their products, going as far as telling consumers the pills can cure cancer or replace prescription medications, a U.S. government probe found.

In an undercover probe, investigators at the Government Accountability Office also found that labels for some supplements claim to prevent or cure ailments like diabetes or heart disease — a clear violation of U.S. law.

GAO staff targeted supplements most popular with older consumers and posed as elderly buyers in stores or over the telephone.

“The most egregious practices included suspect marketing claims that a dietary supplement prevented or cured extremely serious diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease,” the GAO said in a report released on Wednesday at a Senate hearing.

For example, one shopper at a supplement specialty store was told that a garlic supplement could be taken instead of prescribed blood pressure drugs. Another staffer posing as a forgetful, elderly consumer was told by a salesperson that he could take aspirin and ginkgo biloba together with no harm. The Food and Drug Administration has said that combination can cause internal bleeding.

Find out more.

Making simple changes like getting people to take their medicines exactly as directed or to refill their prescriptions on time could save employers and their workers as much as $163 billion a year in healthcare costs, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts Inc identified various behaviors including brand loyalty, procrastinating on refills and occasional forgetfulness, that increase treatment costs.

“This is the first time we’ve looked at the behavioral factors that are driving spending,” chief scientist Bob Nease commented about Express Scripts’ annual drug trends report.

The cost of these behaviors is a staggering $1 out of every $5 spent on prescription drugs, which account for 10 percent of the $2.3 trillion Americans spend on healthcare each year.

“When you slice it that way, you get this eye-popping figure of $163 billion,” Nease said in a telephone interview.

The report outlines ways for companies and patients to make people aware of the common habits that can increase the cost of healthcare in the United States as the nation looks for ways to pay for its newly passed healthcare reform legislation.

Read more.

A Senate Democrat asked top drugmakers on Wednesday to explain why Americans pay higher prices for prescription drugs than patients do in other developed nations.

Barack Obama  |  Health

Senator Herb Kohl, who chairs the Special Committee on Aging, sent letters to AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, and Sanofi-Aventis.

Kohl said Americans on average pay twice as much as people in other industrialized countries.

“While I firmly believe that drug quality should not be sacrificed for cost, the large discrepancies in the cost of identical drugs cannot be explained by differences in production or manufacturing,” Kohl wrote to the companies.

Some Democrats have attacked drugmakers as the U.S. Congress works on an overhaul of U.S. healthcare system.

The pharmaceutical industry has pledged to pay $80 billion over 10 years in price cuts and other concessions to help fund wider insurance coverage as part of a healthcare overhaul under consideration in Congress.

Some lawmakers have criticized that amount as a small price to pay for a $315 billion-a-year industry that stands to gain tens of millions of new customers if insurance coverage expands. Democrats are trying to pass a final bill for President Barack Obama to sign into law in the coming weeks.

Read more.

Reports Reuters:

It may not be surprising, but a new study offers some proof that patients who are worried about their medications are more likely to have side effects from them.

Health

The study involved patients with a particular kind of arthritis. While more research has to be done in patients with other illnesses to know for sure, “my guess would be that this is happening across a wide range of drugs,” Dr. Yvonne Nestoriuc of Philipps-University Marburg in Germany, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health. “This is really something that happens in a lot of patient populations.”

While most medication side effects are not life threatening or seriously harmful, she and her colleagues note in the journal Arthritis Care & Research, they can still be “frightening and distressing” to patients, and can also lead to patients not taking drugs as recommended.

People with a variety of illnesses who don’t feel their medications are necessary and are concerned about their side effects are known to be less likely to take these drugs as directed, the researchers add.

Find out more.

Drugmakers are starting to get into bed with information technology companies as they struggle to prove the value of their medicines to governments and insurers.

By using smart gadgets to monitor patients in real time, pharmaceutical companies believe they can improve clinical outcomes and establish the cost-effectiveness of treatments.

The result, according to a report on Thursday from Ernst & Young, will be a host of new collaborations between pharmaceutical companies and businesses in non-traditional areas such as computing, telecoms and even retail.

A few such tie-ups are already happening.

Novartis, for example, signed a $24 million deal last month with U.S.-based Proteus Biomedical to create “smart pills” that can transmit data from inside the body to monitor patients’ vital signs and check they have taken medicines as prescribed.

Bayer is connecting its glucometer for diabetic children to Nintendo’s video-gaming consoles to promote consistent blood sugar testing.

And Johnson & Johnson’s Lifescan unit has an iPhone application that lets users upload readings from their connected blood glucose monitors to their Apple phone.

“We will see multiple types of collaborations in future,” Patrick Flochel, Ernst & Young life sciences leader for Europe, Middle East, India and Africa, told Reuters.

“This movement will be driven by a focus on outcomes, which pharma companies are more and more having to commit themselves to.”

Find out more.

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.

Drug makers say they have valid business reasons for the price increases. Critics say the industry is trying to establish a higher price base before Congress passes legislation that tries to curb drug spending in coming years.

Read more at the NYT.

The best way to save on prescription drugs is to go generic.

Though that advice has long been known, it’s received a ringing endorsement from AARP’s latest “watchdog report” on drug prices.

Manufacturer prices for widely used brand-name drugs jumped an average of 8.7 percent in 2008 — more than double the general inflation rate of 3.8 percent.

That’s the biggest annual increase in six years.

On the other hand, AARP’s Public Policy Institute found that the average cost of the most common generic drugs fell 10.6 percent last year.

Actually, the prices for most generics didn’t change in 2008, but where prices did drop, the changes often were substantial — sometimes 50 percent or more.

Though generic drugs account for about two-thirds of all retail prescriptions, many people still aren’t taking advantage of the lower prices.

“Consumers looking to cut their drug costs should talk with their doctors or pharmacists about generic equivalents,” said John Rother, AARP’s public policy director.

A generic equivalent might not always look like the brand-name drug, but the active ingredients are regulated by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

The AARP study found that people who take three brand-name medications for chronic conditions saw their drug costs climb by an average of more than $550 last year.

In contrast, people who take three generics enjoyed an average savings of $38 in 2008.

“Switching to generic drugs whenever possible is one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce your health care bills,” Rother said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s top official vowed on Thursday to warn companies more quickly about problems found during inspections and act more aggressively in serious cases that could directly harm consumers and patients.

The move “will help to ensure that violations are taken seriously, that warning letters and enforcement actions occur in a timely manner,” FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said in remarks at a Food and Drug Law Institute event.

Hamburg said the agency would no longer require all warning letters be reviewed by the agency’s top lawyer before being sent to manufacturers except in certain, more legally complex cases.

That system caused “unreasonable delays” and “in some cases, serious violations have gone unaddressed for far too long” and put the public’s health at risk, she said.

The FDA began funneling all warning letters through its chief counsel’s office during the Bush administration. Critics said the move was a favor to makers of drugs, medical devices and other products as it slowed the process and reduced the number of warnings.

Read more at Reuters.